#10. NEVERWINTER NIGHTS
Baldur’s Gate was great. Baldur’s Gate 2 is, to this day, considered one of the best RPGs ever made. How would BioWare follow up on that?
Not as well as you might have hoped. Neverwinter Nights ended up being a hugely ambitious game, with marvellous graphics and incredible sound design for its time, and a very well realized setting of its Dungeons and Dragons world. It also had, long before “live service games” would be BioWare’s downfall, an entire mode dedicated to running your own campaigns, Dungeons and Dragons style, by connecting to an internet service—which was an incredibly daring move that they pulled off surprisingly well.
But the writing and role playing possibilities never quite came close to Baldur’s Gate 2, or even BioWare’s follow up games. This isn’t to say Neverwinter Nights was bad, because it was not—as mentioned, there was a lot to like about it. But it never came close to approaching the already high standards the developer had set for the genre with its previous games.
